Second Life Goes Corporate

Business is making its home in the virtual space as virtual worlds focus on providing a more corporate environment.

Linden Lab announced their release of the expansion to Second Life, a program in beta called Second Life Enterprise which aims to create a secure, more cost-effective, corporate friendly program on Wednesday.

“We’re in an environment with a high cost of travel,” Atwood said. “This is a significantly cheaper way to bring people together in real-time.”

Unlike the first Second Life, Enterprise offers a much more secure network, more visual, audio and text collaboration tools, seven prepackaged virtual regions with an auditorium, two conference centers and a number of sandbox regions. The program can support up to eight regions simultaneously and 800 users in the same environment, according to Linden Lab.

More than 1,400 organizations use Second Life as a more efficient and cost-effective way to host meetings, train, and prototype new technologies.

IBM, Northrop Grumman, Naval Undersea Warfare Center, DefenseWeb Technologies, Case Western Reserve University and The New Media Consortium are a few of the 14 organizations participating in the Beta program for Second Life Enterprise.

Linden Lab works with the military to create a product secure enough to be used with the military.

“Virtual Worlds have the potential to provide a safer, more cost effective approach to some of the Navy’s current mission areas. The Naval Undersea Warfare Center has collaborated with Linden Lab to create a version of Second Life Enterprise that is secured and meets military grade information assurance compliance standards – out of the box,” said Douglas Maxwell, program technology lead for NUWC Metaverse Strategic Initiative.

Linden Lab is working to create another program to complement Enterprise called Second Life Work Marketplace. Work Marketplace will allow customers to browse, test and purchase content from third-party developers.

Second Life Enterprise starts at a cost of $55,000 and its expected availability will be in the first half of 2010.